Product feeds – the good, the bad and the ugly

Posted on November 19, 2009 by Paul · Posted in Affiliate Networks, Affiliate Programs, Track our Progress, Website Design

For those that have been following our progress will notice that we have a lot of sites that feature product feeds from the merchants through the affiliate networks. Getting to grips with some of these product feeds has been hard work. Some merchants products feeds are quite frankly almost unusable. That is the categories, the product descriptions, products being listed more than once are but a few of the pitfalls requiring very carefully crafted SQL statements to manipulate and pull out only those products which are relevant.

So I would like to highlight a merchant who has got their product feed spot on and is the best product feed I have worked with in my long (ok fairly short) affiliate career so far. My award for the best product feed so far goes to Jokers Masquerade who we use for our womens fancy dress site. They have their product feed setup perfectly. The merchant categories are superbly done enabling us to use fairly simple SQL select statements to pull the right information out of our database. The descriptions are great so hats off to them. We look forward to continuing to work with them and add a great range of products to our fancy dress site.

Jokers Masquerade are available through AffiliateWindow.